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Dido (prt 2) and Staging Pleasures - Coggle Diagram
Dido (prt 2) and Staging Pleasures
Philip Stubbes'
The Anatomy of Abuses
: "All Stage plays, Enterludes, and Commedies are either of divine or profane matter". What's so dangerous about the stage?
god's blood is not here for entertainment; it's blasphemy; "to be derided, and iested" making a joke out of religous discourse
plays pull people out of the holy spaces/churches: " they not draw the people frō"; "flocking and rūning to Theaters & curtens daylie and hourely, night and daye, tyme and" -- the logic is this displaces Church, and it also relie son a binary way of thinking; it also is a way of shaping the self as mindless and not thinking for themself;
what about the content is bad: "kissing and bussing" being tempted by what they're SEEING; it's a space for bodies to be with other bodies;
here's the problem with THE ACTORS BODIES: putting wrong idols on stage and directing the wrong intention;
the fears of seeing and internalizing queer content into practice: "they play ye Sodomits, or worse"
In your small group, what specific scenes, stage business, and/or dialogues in Marlowe's
Dido, Queen of Carthage
may or may not spark such moral panic (as evidenced by Stubbes' pamphlet)?
Act 1.1. : the staging of childhood, gift-giving, and proper/imporper desire sets up a framework for encountering Dido and Aneas.
3.1: Cupid to Dido to fall in love; this is about using a child actor to curate "desire"; how does this get us to think about power. "The shall I touch her breast and conquer her" (3.1.6). But this model is flipped:
desire (not love) and unaccountable
obsession
: 5.1.170: Dido imagining Aneas goes, dies, and his corpse comes back for her to adorn. Yikes. There is anxiety here as SHE is the one setting the (violent) terms of desire; claims Aneas?
there is a concern about owning men's bodies (the blazon tradition: 3.1.80-91): breakind Aneas body into parts for her ownership/pleasure (
blazon
)
so, if this is a rhetoric about visual consumption, we also have a very frank language of gazing, looking, and turning Aneas into passive object to be looked at. 5.1.110
Dido's death scene: 5.1: is this death scene a radical reclamation of spectacle and resistant to objectification: "Now, Dido, with these relics burn thyself, And make Aeneas famous through the world / For purjury and slaughter of a ween" (5.1.293-6). It's also about the traffic of gendered materials (the cloak, etc)
it's a "private sacrifice"
What do we do with this play?
1) Even if this is about Dido's agency and rulership, the ending backfires to confirm ideas about women's out of control desires?
2) The opening framework is about two men being interrupted by Juno, so "normal" gendered and sexual roles aren't a given here. THe use of myths open up resistant to tropes of women as out of control; the queer use of myths to render a queer mythology/cosmology
plays in on the literary and cultural histories of same-sex relations
this opens up larger concerns about fate and autonomy